Lightsquared has issued an update to Flightglobal on the condition of its SkyTerra 1 satellite after it was knocked out by a solar storm:
A network outage over our SkyTerra 1 satellite began at approximately at 13:30 GMT on 7 March. On 10 March, all traffic carried on SkyTerra 1 was transferred over to the MSAT satellite system, which is in place to provide coverage and service redundancy for our satellite network. The MSAT system will continue to carry this traffic for an indefinite amount of time while we make deliberate plans with our customers to move the traffic back. Services will be restored over our SkyTerra 1 Space Based Network as soon as operationally feasible and in conjunction with customer coordination to avoid disruption to their services.
The LightSquared and Boeing team have preliminarily concluded that the original loss of traffic was due to the solar flare experienced on 7 March, that impaired two sensors on the satellite causing the on board computers to go to safe mode. This was a temporary condition caused by the extreme levels of radiation due to the flare. This required a complete reboot of the satellite and checkout of its systems. This is why we made the determination to move customer traffic over to the redundant MSAT system in the interim. A detailed investigation and root cause and corrective action is ongoing.
